π
2009-12-20 01:01
in Linux
I migrated my main laptop from a Z61p to a slightly thinner W500. The big plus was not the slightly better CPU or support for more than 3GB of Ram, but the fact that it lets me select a lower performing Intel G450 video card instead of the fast power hungry and not well supported ATI one.
I've managed to get from an uncertain 25W to a 10W by switching to the Intel driver and turning off everything I can outside of the screen. Amazing!
Anyway, the point of this post was to talk about benchmarks. I was curious to know how much faster switching from a 5400RPM drive to a 7200RPM drive would be (I have a 500GB drive, SSD in that size is not too much an option yet, and I'm not really hurting for speed anyway).
The next thing was to see how much dmcrypt was slowing me down.
Ready for it?
dmcrypt gave me virtually no slowdown on a kernel build and a mere 4-5 seconds to get Enlightenment started from boot (about 40 seconds from lilo prompt to Enlightenment loaded and opening its screen with Eterms already loaded).
So, I really don't care about 4 seconds of boot time if it makes virtually no difference once the system is running. The best part was that switching from a 160GB 7200 RPM drive without dmcrypt to a 500GB 7200 RPM drive with dmcrypt, opening a maildir folder with 50,000 messages actually went DOWN from 50-ish seconds to 16-ish seconds!
7200 vs 5400RPM gave a modest boot speed improvement (8 seconds) and considering I boot once a month on average, it's really not something I care much for. Opening a maildir folder is faster by a few seconds (15%-ish) but nothing earth shattering. Building a kernel is maybe 20 seconds faster. All this to say that 7200 RPM is not something I would kill or pay load of extra money to get.
Anyway, switching from my old 5400RPM drive with dmcrypt to a 7200RPM drive with dmcrypt (all using ext4 on a freshly layed out filesystem).
Oh, the other test I did quickly was to see whether HIMEM64G (enabling PAE and a 3rd level indirection required for me to see 64GB instead of 3GB), and indeed HIMEM64G is a tad slower than running without HIMEM4G as I had feared, but not by a whole lot (looks like less than 5%), so I'm willing to ignore it.
Raw data below. It shows time from lilo prompt to X starting, and E fully launched as well as how long it takes to open my rcvd and snd maildir folders on a cold cache. Then, I build a full featured kernels with 4 concurrent threads.
5400 RPM 160GB seagate, no dmcrypt, HIMEM64G
boot1: 27 X start / 50 E ready / 0:58 rcvds / 0:52 snd
kernel build #1:
real 23m24.829s
user 39m59.454s
sys 4m16.530s
kernel build #2:
real 22m47.524s
user 39m52.953s
sys 4m16.569s
boot 2: 23 X start / 41 E ready / 0:58 rcvd / 0:34 snd
kernel build #1:
real 23m3.003s
user 40m2.183s
sys 4m17.200s
kernel build #2:
real 22m38.859s
user 40m0.710s
sys 4m21.401s
boot 3: 25 X start / 46 E ready / 0:58 rcvd / 0:34 snd
kernel build #1:
real 24m19.828s
user 40m1.283s
sys 4m35.624s
kernel build #2:
real 23m51.198s
user 39m58.137s
sys 4m37.391s
boot 4: 23 X start / 42 E ready / 0:60 rcvd / 0:33 snd
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
7200 RPM 160GB seagate, no dmcrypt, HIMEM64G
boot 1: 21 X start / 36 E ready / 0:48 rcvd / 0:25 snd
kernel build #1:
real 23m22.448s
user 39m49.538s
sys 4m13.604s
boot 2: 21 X start / 34 E ready / 1:03 rcvd / 0:21 snd
kernel build #1:
real 22m58.988s
user 39m53.308s
sys 4m12.700s
kernel build #2:
real 22m43.217s
user 39m50.925s
sys 4m14.976s
boot 3: 21 X start / 35 E ready / 0:39 rcvd / 0:20 snd
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
7200 RPM 500GB hitachi, dmcrypt, HIMEM64G
boot 1: 27 X start / 40 E ready / 0:18 rcvd / 0:19 snd
(cryptsetup unlock takes a few seconds)
kernel build #1:
real 23m14.759s
user 39m56.628s
sys 4m11.470s
kernel build #2:
real 22m46.385s
user 39m52.201s
sys 4m11.900s
boot 2: 26 X start / 39 ready / 0:14 rcvd / 0:18 snd
kernel build #1:
real 23m5.225s
user 39m59.785s
sys 4m11.592s
real 22m47.208s
user 39m52.411s
sys 4m11.155s
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
7200 RPM 500GB hitachi, dmcrypt, HIMEM4G
boot 1: 24 X start / 36 ready / 0:14 rcvd / 0:20 snd
build #1:
real 23m0.698s
user 39m45.571s
sys 4m3.892s
build #2:
real 22m39.361s
user 39m42.988s
sys 4m3.924s |
